Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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Blowing out the candle, he turned over on his side to sleep, his mind charged to the brim with wonder and curious under-thrills of this anticipation. He half expected—what? Reality lay somewhere in the whole strange business; it was not merely imaginative nonsense. Fairyland was close.

And the moment he slept and began to dream, the thing took a lively and dramatic shape. A thousand tiny fingers, soft and invisible, drew him away into the heart of fairyland. There was a terror in him lest he should—stick. But he came out beautifully and smoothly, like a thread of summer grass from its covering sheath.

'I am slippery after all, then—slippery enough,' he remembered saying with surprised delight, and then——

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Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.

Merchant of Venice.

——there came to him a vivid impression of sudden light in the room, and he knew that something very familiar was happening to him, yet something that had not happened consciously for thirty years and more —since his early childhood in the night-nursery with the bars across the windows.